Had Inception been any less good than it was - ie, very good - it would have been a crushing disappointment - writer/director Christopher Nolan has a huge number of runs on the board, and so far as my personal reckoning goes, it must have one of the best ensemble casts ever assembled: in Ellen Page and Joseph Gordon-Levitt the crucial figures in two of the films that I've most taken to heart in the last few years (Juno and (500) Days of Summer), Page in particular being a favourite (but then who doesn't love Ellen Page?); in Cillian Murphy the most enthrallingly odd, more-or-less mainstream character actor in the business; in Marion Cotillard one of the most talented, not to mention most sheerly hot, Movie Stars going around; and in Leonard DiCaprio, an actor whose considerable abilities are forever at risk of being obscured by his looks and stardom but who nonetheless never seems to put a foot wrong.
Really, Inception is the complete package. Its stars all positively exude charisma (speaking of which, apart from those mentioned above, Michael Caine and Ken Watanabe are no slouches in that department either, nor the other key players), breathing life into their characters and navigating the film's many action sequences with equal aplomb; said action is frenetic and genuinely exciting - the equal of that in Nolan's Batmans - and things move along at a ferocious pace.
And of course there's the plot. Like Memento and The Prestige before it, Inception is ingeniously conceived and intricately plotted, but in a way that always plays fair with the audience - Nolan tells us what he's going to do, and then goes ahead and does it. The mechanics of the extraction and dream architecture processes are clearly laid out for us, as is the design for the central heist, and while the history of Cobb's relationship with Mal is revealed in stages, there's no suggestion that the way it's told to us is inaccurate (until a final scene which adds a layer that was always implicit)...the trick, such as it is, is in the construction. Even though all the pieces are there in plain sight (and Nolan handles his narrative elements with impressive economy - there's no place for MacGuffins here), it isn't until afterwards that it becomes obvious just how neatly everything fits together. Would that all blockbusters were this intelligent, this thrilling, this good.
